DropBox is one of the most trusted cloud storage services today but the recent news of it getting down last Friday might make users think twice now. An outage happened after a routine update but the team was able to restore the site within 3 hours. Unfortunately, there were some users (about 5 percent) who experienced errors until yesterday.

It was believed that site was hacked by some anonymous groups but Dropbox was quick to deny the claim. The outage happened from within after a planned maintenance according to Akhil Gupta, head of infrastructure at Dropbox.

On Friday at 5:30 p.m. PT, we had a planned maintenance scheduled to upgrade the OS on some of our machines. During this process, the upgrade script checks to make sure there is no active data on the machine before installing the new OS.

A subtle bug in the script caused the command to reinstall a small number of active machines. Unfortunately, some master-slave pairs were impacted which resulted in the site going down.

Nothing to worry as files of users weren’t at risk. Just those used for camera uploads, API features, and photo album sharing. I’m sure this news will make Dropbox users wary of the cloud storage service. I know I will.